Title: The Black Abbot
Author: Perley Poore Sheehan
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The Black Abbot

by

Perley Poore Sheehan

I

SHANKING, one of the old capitals of China--"the Mountain
Capital," according to its name; with at one time maybe a million
inhabitants in it--and not so many fewer right now, Shattuck
reflected. A swarming big city. An armed camp, really. And he
wondered if he hadn't been rash, after all, as his friends had warned
him he would be, for coming here alone.

Pelham Rutledge Shattuck, sometimes known as Captain Trouble. If
he was the heir of Kubla Khan--as not only he himself but a fair
slice of Asia was now believing him to be--there was nothing special
about his looks to indicate such a glittering destiny. Under thirty;
trim and hard, with eyes that were a sort of ice-blue in a lean brown
face. But, for the rest of him, he might have been any young American
not too prosperous, washed up in China. There were plenty of them;
mostly, however, down on the Coast. Not here in Shanking.

If there was another white man, of any kind as a matter of fact,
in this yellow man's town, Shattuck certainly hadn't seen him--nor
heard of him.

Shanking was too far out of the way. "Shan", meaning mountain or
mountains; said mountains, in the present instance being the Snowy
Range, China's end of the Himalayas, the piled up and rifted frontier
separating China from Tibet. Meaning, in other words, that this was
the Chinese Far West.

Wide open, too. Swarming with soldiers, rather more than
ninety-nine percent, of whom would be, or were now, out-and-out
bandits. Mercenaries, anyway. The followers of three rival war-lords;
and a toss-up which one they'd be following tomorrow.

Shattuck, dressed in the leather and khaki of an engineer or
mining prospector, turned into Shanking's Broadway. Only Broadway, he
saw, was not the name of it.

"T'ung T'ien Chieh!"

"Road to Heaven Street," he translated, from the figures blazoned
on a banner. "And it might be, at that," he added, with a premonition
of danger. Heaven--or the other place--maybe right ahead.

IT wasn't that he was just a lone white man in this mob. He was
Shadak Khan, Captain Trouble, heir of Kubla. He was Kubla Khan
himself back on earth again--and practically unarmed except for the
bamboo stick in his hand and the compact little automatic stored away
against his solar plexus.

The Road to Heaven Street billowed up light and noisy in the early
night. So far as Shanking was concerned, the fleet was in. Thousands
of soldiers, most of them with money, and everything offered that
soldiers like to buy--especially when touched up with a slug or two
of samhu, the Chinese Whisky.

SQUEALS and gongs, a noisy surf of voices, a steady throb of
drums, an unending tangle of music that you heard only when you
listened to it. And smells--all sorts; underlaid with the hearty and
vile, but scaling up, through cook-shop smells, and opium and
alcohol, to musk, to a whiff of incense. This place to the left
looked good to Shattuck--the Stone Jewel Castle, the Shi-Pao-Shih,
according to the street-banners; gambling and what have you; big as a
public market and lit up like a house on fire. And crowded, roaring.
He was looking for information.

So far he'd circulated through the streets without any trouble.
Almost without comment. The crowds were too occupied. Now and then a
covey of gamins would notice him and set up a cry. But his ready,
good-natured retort in a Chinese as fluent and tart as their own
would set them on their way again.

And there may have been something else about him. Kids are the
same the world over, with uncanny perceptions. Like wonks--the dogs
that swarm through Chinese streets--and disappear in times of
famine.

There was nothing especially, anyway, in the appearance of
Shattuck to attract attention. Too many uniforms. Too many strangers.
All sorts of clothes. Shanking had been a frontier mountain for more
than a thousand years--for five thousand maybe.

Deep in the brilliant and crowded interior of the Stone Jewel
Castle, Shattuck found a small vacant table and signaled a waiter. He
ordered tea. "For yourself," he said, and gave the waiter a
dollar.

"And would the honorable gentleman like a lady companion to drink
tea with him?"

Shattuck thought not. And he quoted the well-known proverb that
clouds--and women---were poetic only when far enough away. The
waiter's manners were perfect. He was an elderly man, quick and
bright, who might have been a poet himself in his off moments. The
dollar had touched him.

"T'zu hou, ta-jen!"--"At your excellency's service!"

And with this pleasant phrase still sounding in his brain,
Shattuck heard another:

"K'an yang kou!"--"Look at the foreign dog!"

The steps leading up to a fight are never very clear; nor, as a
rule, worth reporting at any length.

Shattuck had looked in the direction of the speaker. The voice had
come in a snarling drawl with a touch of the foreign--or, at any
rate, of the far backwoods in it. There were four men at the
neighboring table. They were big men, all of them.

And they might have been soldiers, or just outlaws from the
hills--"tiger men," as the Chinese call them; bad men, anyway;
robbers and killers; and dressed in makeshift uniforms they'd stolen,
most likely, from murdered men.

IT WAS the appearance of them, and the thought of what they were,
rather than that remark that fired Shattuck's dangerous temper. This
was doubly so when he singled out the man he couldn't mistake as the
one who had spoken. He was evidently the leader of the four--hard and
brazen as a boulder, with much of the Tibetan about him.

His sneering grin disappeared under the steady look from
Shattuck's ice-blue eyes. And Shattuck's eyes, incidentally, had now
taken on other icy qualities.

Shattuck spoke softly and coldly.

"Before you talk of foreigners," he said, in his perfect
high-country dialect, "you'd better learn the language."

The man did lack speech, but his mind functioned rather
quickly--although it must have been along familiar lines. He
spat--blowing a good mouthful and with Shattuck unquestionably his
target. And his aim was good at that. The only reason, in fact, that
he missed was that Shattuck---quicker than the eye, it seemed--had
slipped aside and come to his feet.

And all in the same second he had cut the spitter across the face
with his bamboo stick.

II

THERE are some phrases that a man picks up and never forgets,
whatever the language he hears them in--like some one unforgettable
face he may have seen in a strange port. The face comes back. The
circumstances disappear.

"Ta kassatoun!"

And that was Tibetan. "Kill him!" was what it meant.

"Ta--ta kassatoum!"

The spitter's three friends were coming to their feet a
split-second after that first blow of Shattuck's. All Tibetans carry
knives. All of them--iron or brass or beautiful steel filigreed with
gold. But deadly; never washed; septic as the claws of a leopard.
Shattuck got in another blow--backhanded this time, at Number Two. He
speared Number Three under the chin with the ferule of the bamboo as
if the stick had been a saber.

This, he recollected, was the Road to Heaven Street. He also
recalled--as if in a gust of red lightning--that he'd come to
Shanking not to fight but to investigate. He'd come here to find out
what he could about that mysterious wizard of a new Tibetan war-lord
known as the "Black Abbot."

The native names shocked through his head. Maybe he was hearing
them. There was a howling, squealing human whirlpool developing about
him and he was in the vortex of it.

"Kara Kanpo!"--all same for one the "Black Abbot." There was
another name: "Namche Goro!"--like saying "our Lord of the Dark,"
just about.

THE trouble with the Tibetans was that they were getting in each
other's way in these first few seconds. The leader of the four lost
two seconds getting at his knife. His new tunic was bothering
him.

Just as the knife came out--a foot in length and ugly as an
adder--Shattuck was able to hit him again.

This, Shattuck again remembered, was like another fight--in the
dim, dim past--the one when Michman-der, the Afghan, had called him a
Fighting Fool. Was that what he really was? He hadn't started this
fight, But he was fighting with all he had--not only body and heart,
but brain!

His stick was broken. He grabbed a chair and with this he poked
and struck. At the same time he said things, in Chinese, in the Four
Rivers dialect.

"Down with the barbarians," he said.

All Tibetans were barbarians to the people of Shanking--an old
border hate, going back through the centuries.

Shattuck sprung another card. In a crowd like this, it should have
been an ace of trumps.

"Up, Boxers!" he said. "Have you forgotten the Fist?"

"I Ho Huan!"

THERE must have been some of the old Boxers present. Or new
ones--the Patriotic Harmony Fist was being revived in a thousand
Chinese towns. "Huan" was fist, for fighting. "Ho" was harmony, for
we'd fight as one. "I" meant just holy or patriotic, the two words
the same thing anyway when you got right down to it.

A mixed crowd and a big one. This was a battle royal--a dozen or
twenty fights starting up all at once, and some of them with a dozen
or a score of fighters in the mill at that--screeching, biting,
cutting, trying for strangle holds. It was like a cat-fight--its
speed the only thing that staved off wholesale murder. No one stayed
in one place long enough to finish the job, or get finished, except
here and there.

Flashes of red lightning and a growing rush and shock of
thunder.

Shattuck was still on his feet and he headed for the door.

It was a case of fighting every inch--fighting every second. There
were shots. That was bad. Anyone might get hit. Someone was--right in
the tangle in front of Shattuck; a little sing-song girl--a mu-tsai,
with a face like porcelain--and a splotch of red in the middle of her
forehead.

Shattuck caught her as she wilted. And this, he knew, was about
the end of the fight for him. War, this was; but war always had
things like this that he hated.

Still, at that! A swift end--or a dragged out misery. War was just
ordinary life speeded up---concentrated--eighty years in as many
seconds.

He had a club in his hand, part of a chair-back. The girl hung
limp on his arm, light as a bird.

All this, thought and action, had been as hot and swift as a swirl
of flame. And, suddenly and all at once, Shattuck was aware that the
flame was dying out--not only for himself but for others. An uncanny
feeling. It was as if a breath of cold paralysis had hit the
place.

There'd been no one specially notable sound in that riot of
sounds--nothing that could have passed as a signal of command. But
you now began to notice sounds that you hadn't noticed before--the
collapse of a table, the shifting of feet as people pressed for the
doors, a panting of lungs, then the outside noises of the street
getting themselves heard again.

And then, after a couple of straining seconds, a sort of general
whisper--in more dialects than any one man could learn in a lifetime,
yet all of them understandable. It was more like a whisper you heard
in your own brain, in the undefinable language of hunch or
premonition:

"Kara Kanpo!"

"Namche Goto!"

"Black Abbot--Lord of the Dark!"

III

SHATTUCK had been hearing whispers something like that for months.
There was a High Priest of Darkness reaching out for control of the
world. Sometimes he was the Kara Kanpo, sometimes the Namche
Goro--the Midnight Apostle, so to speak. But by whatever title he was
known, he was always the same. The titles meant the same thing. They
meant the Black Abbot.

"A Tsen," as the Tibetans called him, "One of the Mighty," He'd
already got the Dalai Lama under his thumb and was holding him as a
hostage. He had the Red Sect back of him, the Bon-po, which was
supposed to be the oldest religion in the world and dealt in
magic.

IN any case, if he controled the Dalai Lama, the Black Abbot would
also be master of the Dalai Lama's palace, the Potala, in Lhassa.
That meant gold. Treasure had been pouring, trickling, pouring again,
into the caves of the Potala for years. None had ever come out. Not
until now, when the Black Abbot had decided that his hour was at
hand.

In exchange for some small part of the Potala gold, arms had been
coming into Tibet by every caravan that crossed the Western Gobi.

One of these caravans Shattuck had captured himself long ago, back
in the Little Valley of the Soaring Meditation. It had marked the
beginning of his own rise to fame. That fight had marked him as the
reincarnation of Kubla Khan. The old Bogdo of the Soaring Meditation
Lamasery had told him so, had given him Kubla's sword.

Rumors of the appearance of the Black Abbot had reached him in the
middle of the Gobi, when he'd come into contact with the Arghati, the
hidden people, guardians of Shamballah, the "Kingdom Come" of the
next world Buddha, the great Maitreya, Lord of the World. Before
Maitreya could appear, the Black Abbot would have to be destroyed.
The destroyer would be the heir to Kubla's sword, Shadak Khan.

"Me, Shadak Khan," said Shattuck to himself.

And there for a moment he was feeling like two different persons
possessed of a single body. There was the Pelham Rutledge Shattuck,
educated mostly in New York, American from away back. And there was
the Shadak Khan who, American still, had happened to be born in
China, brought up in China, and who, through a series of accidents,
had returned to China to find the sword of the great Kubla ready to
his hand.

He wished that he had the sword with him now. But he'd left it
back in Kansu, in Minchow, to rule there during his absence.

Old stuff! Fairy tales!

So the American part of himself was calling all this talk about
Black Abbots and the coming of a new world-king who would be a King
of Peace. Yet, suddenly, here and now, Shattuck felt that this
American part of himself was nothing but a very little boy. The other
self--his real self--went back through the ages. And age after age,
this older self had been sopping up experience, dealing out death and
receiving it, learning about things both visible and invisible,
getting evidence of things forgotten and things to come.

CURIOUS, but all this flashing through his thought while he still
stood there with the dead girl lying in the hollow of his
arm--almost, it seemed, as if she were telling him of things she was
discovering now. He listened as if to a silent Chinese whisper.

Shanking, at any rate, had known something about the coming of the
great Tibetan war-lord. While the local war-lords fought and
squabbled among themselves, the reports kept coming in from over the
mountains. Pilgrims, spies, coolies, Chiarung--the "Back Valley
Peoples"--all told the same story. The Black Abbot was coming. He was
coming with an army.

And at last he had come.

IV

DURING the several minutes that must have followed before Shattuck
was face to face with one of the strangest men he was ever to meet,
that feeling of the weird hung about him. It wasn't the fact that he
had a dead girl in the crook of his arm. He'd been too often in
contact with death for that to affect him--at any rate, in this
highly special way. Death--that was but the turning out of a light;
no more, no less. It might be with regret, as at the closing of a
half-read story. Generally, not even this regret. You called it a
day, turned out the light and went to sleep!

For a little space, he was occupied with looking for a place to
put the girl. He laid her on the clean matting of a deserted fan-tan
table.

He still had his club. A touch told him that he hadn't lost the
little gun over his stomach.

Soldiers were now clearing the place--military police; in neat
woolen uniforms, he noticed; European cut but with Tibetan boots.
Those boots were another reminder of the Black Abbot. A new
warlord--the super-war-lord--come out of Tibet. It was to find out
about him that Shattuck had come over into the Four River country
from Kansu.

These soldiers, whoever they were, spoke well for their chief.
Real soldiers these were---disciplined, efficient; each armed with a
club like a baseball bat, and in the end of the bat a steel hook. A
Japanese invention that was--better than fingers for nabbing,
jerking, or all-round punishment.

And the way those soldiers trotted about clearing the place was
fine and awful. Smack, prod, hook. Chinese mobs never were noisy
under punishment.

A gang of ten or twelve Chinamen thickened about Shattuck. They
were big men of various ages--some in straight Chinese dress, several
in uniforms with the green tab and chop of the Shanking army.

They were Huans, Fists, they were telling Shattuck: good Boxers.
They'd stood by him in the fight. Now it was time to go--go quickly.
They would show him where. They knew who he was. The White
Chinaman--the one and only White Boxer--Chi Tsu, what! And Chi Tsu
was the Chinese name of Kubla Khan.

A squad of those soldiers came running up with orders for the
Chinamen to follow the rest. They seemed to be ignoring the presence
of the white man. But the very way they ignored him singled him out.
Shattuck felt it himself.

"Go!" he told his volunteer friends.

"You will be killed!"

"Maybe not!"

Before the hurried parley could go further, the corporal in charge
of the clearing squad swung his club and the hook caught one of the
Chinese civilians by the throat.

"Ah-ai!" he went--a powerful man, but helpless. In another moment
the hook might have torn out his windpipe.

BUT the corporal wielding the hooked club was also at a momentary
disadvantage--like a swordsman with his blade wedged in a bone. And
Shattuck jumped him--this time with no weapons but his hands. The
corporal lost his grip on the club and the club swung free as
Shattuck tightened his clutch about the fellow's throat.

Instantly there had been another killing. He who had been hooked
had released the steel from his neck. All in a single, half-blind
gesture he banged it down on the corporal's skull.

Shattuck, the moment his hands were free, had jerked the gun from
under his shirt.

"Halt!" he barked.

WITH the corporal's squad covered, he ventured a look over his
shoulder.

He would never forget that first impression. It was as if he'd
seen a skeleton standing there--a skeleton shrouded in black--nothing
but the death's head showing--the face of a skull with a dangling
scant mustache and beard that might have been tatters of crepe.

You think fast on such occasions. Shattuck did, at any rate. This
was Asia, the frontier of Tibet. There were queer things in
Tibet--things that the outside world had whispered about since time
of mind: "Rollang," for example, the Tibetan magic of resurrecting
the dead. But he wouldn't let himself go along these lines. If he
did, he'd be crazy. If he lost his head now, he was gone.

He saw that his squad were held for the moment by something more
than his gun.

Shattuck took a quick step back and away and as he did so he swung
his gun onto the man in black. The move may have been not a second
too soon. There'd been a clicking of breech-locks and a breath of
stealthy movement somewhere else in the room. Shattuck knew that he
himself would now be covered. At any instant--at the slightest
signal, the faintest nod of Fate--and there'd be a crash of fire,
himself pitching headlong--his own light out.

He spoke softly.

"Do we go together?" he asked that black ghost of a figure.

There was a longish pause--long enough for Shattuck to think how
queer this was.

The Shi-Pao-Shih. The Stone Jewel Castle. In America they'd be
calling it the Diamond Palace. Gambling palace after a battle. Crowds
on the run but the gaudy lanterns still shimmering red and gold. Dead
girl on the fan-tan table. And the Black Abbot--the future ruler of
Asia, maybe--standing there covered by a gun made in the U. S. A.

"I would talk with you--in private," the Black Abbot said.

V

IT WAS Shattuck's turn to pause. His senses were telling him
pretty much what he couldn't see. A hundred--maybe two
hundred--soldiers now in the room straining to let fly at him, his
own gun trained on that black figure that had the say-so as to what
might happen next.

Unless Shattuck himself let fly.

That was a chance that the Black Abbot himself must have measured.
Yet he hadn't winced. That voice of his--suggesting a private
conference--had come as smooth and well modulated as if he'd been
speaking to one of his own ministers of state--if he had any. His
language, by the way, had been flawless Chinese.

"You," said Shattuck, "are the Black Abbot."

"They call me that."

"And me? Who am I?"

"American--Meikuo-jin; here on a pass issued at Minkow, Kansu
Province."

There was no change of expression on the bony white face. Only the
dark eyes were alive---fixed and brilliant, like the eyes of a bat. A
man above the average height, appearing taller still because of that
black robe he wore--the yakhair khalat of the Tibetan common people,
but longer and clean. There was a red braid showing on the edge,
suggesting that the garment might have been lined with red. The feet
of the Great One were shod in red and black Tibetan boots of heavy
felt.

SHATTUCK obeyed an impulse he couldn't explain. Deliberately, he
returned his weapon to its holster under his shirt. He knew--and the
Black Abbot knew he knew it--that the same spy who had reported his
passing the Shanking Ta Hung Men---the Great Red Gate--might as
easily as not have been given an order to kill him as soon as he
entered the city.

"On a pass issued at Minkow," said Shattuck. "By whom?"

"By him who sent you here," the Abbot replied.

Not since the first word had passed between them had there been
any use of complimentary terms on either side. Their language had
been as naked as swords out for business.

"This man knows who I am," said Shattuck to himself, "or he
wouldn't bother to answer me." He turned to the Chinese brethren
who'd volunteered to help him in his fight. "Go quietly," he told
them. "And you, comrade," he said to the man with the wounded neck
who'd killed the soldier, "take care of your scratch. And a good
night's sleep."

They were all so frightened they were sweating. But, at that,
their courage was greater than their fear. They would have lingered
or taken the White Great Man with them.

"Go," Shattuck repeated. "And I will watch you on your way."

He could feel the situation growing tenser. At least he was having
the chance to do a little needed scouting on his own. From there
where he stood he could see that the Road to Heaven Street--so
crowded when he entered this place--was now practically deserted.
That meant the street out there was patrolled by the Black Abbot's
men.

And his guess had been right so far as the interior of the Stone
Jewel Castle itself was concerned. Soldiers all around--not armed
with merely hooked clubs either. A shine of metal. A tightening web
of nerves and muscles. Shattuck felt like a jack rabbit in a cordon
of greyhounds. Almost.

This was no playtime. There were other sleepers on the floor
besides the Tibetan corporal. The girl who'd been shot lay on her
table like a broken, gaily dressed doll--not quite life-sized. The
wound on her porcelain forehead was black. Just two little trickles
of blood had come out and clotted there, crooked, complex, yet with a
suggestion of art--of design.

Shattuck felt an inner thrill, a start. It was something confined
to heart and brain. His eyes were steady and cool as they came again
to the sinister shape of the Black Abbot.

"I must ask you to excuse me," Shattuck said, "for keeping you
waiting for even this little while. As a matter of fact I came to
Shanking to find out about you. I had heard stories about your gifts
of magic."

"Later!" said the Black Abbot. "We'll talk about that and other
things at our leisure. This is not the place."

HIS black eyes narrowed. He had a slight movement of the hand that
was like a checked command, Shattuck held steady. It took all his
will power to do so. His life was hanging by a thread. But the thread
was growing stronger. The mark he had seen on the girl's forehead was
like a Chinese symbol--an ideagraph--brushed onto an ivory tablet. He
could see it--with the eyes of his brain--all the time that his outer
eyes were fixed on the Abbot's white face.

So far, the Abbot hadn't moved since Shattuck had first seen him.
They were all of twenty feet apart, with a scattering of chairs and
tables between them--too far for a rush when so many guns were ready
to crash.

But now it was as if the dead girl had come to his aid. A little
while ago she had seemed to whisper. Now she had as if spoken
again--more loudly, unmistakably.

"Did you ever hear of Feng Wang?" Shattuck asked. Feng Wang was
the King of Hell. The Abbot stared. Head of the Bon-pos, Satan
worshipers--the old Red Sect of Tibet. "He's written his signature on
this girl's forehead." Shattuck said. "Would you like to see?"

The Black Abbot hesitated. He took a step forward. Americans, even
more than most white men, had a reputation for a magic of their own
in the East.

The Black Abbot overcame his hesitation. He came forward. His
curiosity became a fascination. Sure enough, this was magic, and a
magic he could understand. He circled the fan-tan table like a gaunt
black shadow.

"Feng Wang!" he whispered. "Perhaps! But not well done. The
character is broken--"

VI

THE Chinese have a saying that he who rides a tiger can't
dismount. Shattuck thought of that---in the back of his brain. In
such a case, he told himself, the only thing to do was to ride the
tiger to a finish.

"Let us get this clear," he said aloud--just loud enough for the
Black Abbot himself to hear. "I am here on a pass from Shadak Khan.
The pass itself is magic, else now I wouldn't be alive. He has become
master of Kansu. With his own hand he killed two war-lords there--Yu,
the Green Shiver; Wang, surnamed the Terrible. With his own hand he
wiped out the Spider Tong, the killers and blackmailers."

HE paused. There'd been a hint of shifting movement from some far
part of the room. Then, over in another direction, a paper lantern
had mysteriously caught fire.

Shattuck barked an order to put out the fire. It struck him with a
strangeness--something far from pleasant--when no one moved.

"Shall I tell them?" the Black Abbot breathed.

"Not unless you would die," said Shattuck. "Shadak Khan is willing
to add to his tally--and you next. My hand is his."

The burning lantern flared, then died down.

"I would tell you something," said the Black Abbot.

"Then, first, point with your finger to the Satan mark and tell me
what you have to say as if explaining what you see. Softly."

The gaunt figure in the black cloak did as he was told--quietly,
with an air of meditation. There was that touch of the actor about
him that all the great ones of the earth possess to some degree. His
voice, when he spoke, came in a lulling whisper.

"You tell me far less than I know about Shadak Khan," he said.
"The secret writings of Tibet have foretold his coming since time
began. Captain Trouble, the Essence of Battle, Way-Maker for the
Maitreya. I came down out of Tibet to offer him my help."

"You?"

"Me. And why not? I'm not blind to the movement of the stars. This
is the end of the Black Age--end of the Great Night. The Shadak Khan
has already established himself at the Koko Nor--the Valley of the
Blue Lake--where all the caravans from the North come into Tibet. I
didn't disturb him there. I chose to come the more dangerous and
crowded way, down into the Sze-chuen--the Four Rivers."

There was truth in what the Black Abbot said--enough of truth, at
any rate, to flavor the rest of it.

"I know what goes on and is being said in the outside world," the
Black Abbot continued; and again he put out a long lean finger as if
to demonstrate an explanation. "They say a force from Tibet invades
China--a hint to old rivals to invade Tibet. Children and fools!
Children and fools! They don't know that with the rise of the Great
Day Tibet will dominate the world again--first China, then India,
then Russia, then the world!"

The actor in the Black Abbot was rising---some emotional self that
would never have been suspected as an occupant of that skeleton
frame. The Black Abbot had not only raised his voice. He was making
gestures.

Just as Shattuck pressed forward with a command on his lips, the
climax came like the suffocating pall of death itself.

VII

THE thing had happened so fast--with such a fierce
unexpectedness--that it was practically over before Shattuck could
realize what had happened. He was in a stifling blackness. He'd been
tripped and thrown. He was down on his back in a twisted heap and on
top of him there was a crushing, writhing weight.

He had a moment of clairvoyance such as the dying are said to
have--or such as the newborn have, according to some doctors of the
East: Why babies use their first breath for a cry of pain.

Shattuck understood.

The Black Abbot, leading up to his attack by that growing
vehemence of word and gesture, had ended by thrusting back his robe
in such a way as completely to blanket the enemy. Then he must have
completed this much of the attack by a wrestling trick. Hatha Yoga,
Tantrick magic--they abounded in physical secrets developed and
polished through a score of centuries.

THOSE straining soldiers--aware all along, most likely, that
something was wrong--had come running.

By a desperate effort, Shattuck got an almost dislocated arm into
action. He reached his gun. He fired. He heard a muffled scream. But
a gun-butt or a club thudded gun and hand before he could fire again.
At the same time the stifling cloak became more stifling still.
Invisible hands were drawing it tight--then tighter yet--across his
nose and mouth--across his straining throat.

He struggled. He fought. But it was as if he'd been taken under a
landslide. His consciousness was slipping. While his heart pumped
pain and yet more pain into a crazy retort already overcharged.

When he awoke--too sore and lazy to open his eyes right away--it
was to a dim perception of familiar sounds. Vaguely he remembered
having come into the Stone Jewel Castle and ordering tea. Had he
fallen asleep in his chair? Had he been drugged? Not, he decided, by
that lost poet of a waiter. Yet the sounds he was hearing--somewhat
strained and far away--were undoubtedly the sounds he'd just been
hearing in the Shi-Pao-Shih.

It called for an effort, but he opened his eyes.

HE was in a strange room, lit by lanterns, solidly lacquered in
red. In the red a dark cloud moved and focused. And memory was back
on him with a rush as he recognized the Black Abbot standing over
him.

Shattuck tried to sit up. A single try was enough. Just then it
was. There was a thin silk noose about his neck that tightened, then
held.

He knew that trick--a halter that could choke almost to the point
of strangulation. But not quite. Otherwise, there'd be danger of
suicide--especially in case of torture meant to be long drawn
out.

The same movement told him that his hands and feet were tied--hard
and fast, this time, and spread-eagle style.

He shut his eyes and again his ears were active. The Black Abbot
had evidently established his headquarters on the upper floor of the
Stone Jewel pleasure-house. Shattuck had heard of such things.
Perhaps the contrast was pleasant after the bleak living of
Tibet.

"Kara Kanpo," said Shattuck; the "Black Abbot."

And now he could open his eyes with no hint of weakness in them.
He'd buried regret, buried fear. He was still alive and confronted
with the business of life.

"I suggested," said the Black Abbot, moderately and correctly,
"that I would talk to you in private."

"Why?"

"Because there was no room in Asia--nor the world--for two Shadak
Khans."

"Why do you tell me that?"

"Because of your pretense."

"What pretense?"

"You fool! You dare to ask me? Signing your own passport with the
seal of the Conqueror!"

So he's found that out, Shattuck reflected. "Go on," he said
aloud.

"Look at me," the Black Abbot said. "You might as well use your
eyes for you won't have them long." His voice had become a sort of
falsetto hum.

Shattuck waited. The muted squeals and music, rattle and whir from
the gambling-rooms polluted the silence of the red chamber.

VIII

THE Black Abbot had either a curious sense of humor or a queer
gift for the refinements of torture. For a time he'd appeared to
forget Shattuck entirely. He ordered tea. He smoked a pipe, and the
odor of this was that of English tobacco flavored with a drug that
Shattuck couldn't identify. And all the time that he was doing this
he wound and rewound and played off the same old roll of a mechanical
piano just back of Shattuck's head. What the tune was, Shattuck would
never know. Here and there was a bar or a phrase that seemed vaguely
familiar at first. But the rest was clatter and bang, a stuttering
lapse, then a fresh explosion of clanging discord.

Shattuck shut not only his eyes but his ears. He did this by a
mental effort, remembering that he'd been practically crazy
once--from a blow on his head--and might get that way again.
Gradually, he controlled his breathing as well. The silk cord was
near the strangulation point about his neck.

A quietness descended about him. It was with a start that he
discovered that he may have slept, if only for a few seconds. The
quiet had become a real silence.

He opened his eyes.

HE saw a blurred outline of the Black Abbot leaning close, his
white face as dead as a mask cut from marble but his black eyes
dripping venom. Closer, there was something else. It was the point of
a knife. And now Shattuck's eyes could follow the broad
foreshortening of the blade.

One of the old Tibetan ritual knives, he noticed. There was a
tradition about such things---proven, according to many. Knives like
that could be sent to kill at a distance, far away from the
magician-owner. But requiring an enormous effort, so it was said. As
a result of which that form of murder had fallen into abeyance.

For a second the point of the knife was touching an
eyelid--leaving a sting behind it like that of a poisonous
insect.

"There must be an alternative," said Shattuck.

The knife was lifted away.

"There is," the Black Abbot said. "You will write a
confession."

"Saying what?"

"That you were a liar, a defiler of graves, and that you fled your
own country after murdering your parents. You will say that I saved
you from starvation; and then, having learned who I was, the true and
predestined Shadak Khan, you abused my bounty by setting up this
claim of your own."

"And what would I get from such a bargain?"

"Your life, your eyes."

The voice was almost caressing as the Black Abbot said this. But
again the point of the knife had touched an eyelid, resting there for
a second, leaving its sting.

"No one would believe such a confession even if I wrote it," said
Shattuck.

"Oh, yes they would. You'd read it tomorrow yourself at the Place
of the Big Market. Then, when we've finished with the Four River
Country, we'll go on to Kansu. You'll read your confession again in
the Square of the Yamen at Minchow."

"I would save my eyes," said Shattuck.

"I've heard," said the Black Abbott, "that white men weaken
readily under torture." He meditated, white and implacable, with his
face overhanging Shattuck's and his knife weaving about with what
seemed almost like a gesture of regret. "If you fail me now," he said
softly, "I'll have the nose off your face as well and expose you like
that to the public with a confession for you of my own
composition."

"Black Abbot," said Shattuck, "but grant me the means to think and
write--tea, ink, and the use of one hand."

"A scribe might write it even better than you," said the
Abbot.

"HE might," said Shattuck. "But again, I might also decide to die.
Have you forgotten the Feng Wang chop on the face of that dead girl
downstairs? You're not the only magician in this room."

"Tea and ink we have already," said the Abbot, after thought. "And
the use of one hand."

He began cutting the cords that bound Shattuck's right hand.

Hand and arm were nearly paralyzed, but even that small measure of
liberty was like a breath of free air to a drowning man. As the wrist
came free, some uncontrollable impulse had swept over Shattuck to
fight again. The arm came up like a lunging snake that coiled and
struck.

The first blow had caught the Black Abbot across the face,
bringing him backward, lunging with his knife, finding nothing at
first but empty air. Shattuck jerked head and neck against his own.
Fighting as instinctively as a mongoose attacking a cobra, his teeth
had fastened onto a cord of the neck and held.

And now, that one free hand of his was fighting for his knife.

IX

THE news had been spreading through Shanking ever since that riot
at the Stone Jewel Castle first broke out. Shadak Khan, war-lord of
Kansu, had come to town. His coming had been a direct challenge to
the Black Abbot, he whom no one had dared to challenge before.

The Lieus began to pluck up courage.

The Lieus had been the big family in the Four River Country for
generations. Under the old régime they'd been dukes and
princes. The Revolution had seen them prosper even more than ever
before. Now they were governors and generals in one of the richest
sections of China, a region as big as France.

But they'd got to fighting among themselves. Three Lieus and each
of them a war-lord in the modern style, each with an army at his
personal command.

They'd been fighting each other off and on for the past five
years--while the Black Abbot watched and waited.

Sze-Chuen, meaning Four Rivers; China's Far West.

The Black Abbot had timed his blow. With Tibet at his back and the
Four Rivers at his feet, he'd be the first war-lord of Asia, if--he
could get that white interloper of a Shadak Khan out of the way.

But the people of the Four Rivers also had been thinking a lot
about what had been going on in the neighboring province of Kansu
where the heir of Kubla Khan had appeared. There was something about
his coming there that was like the emergence of a local mountain-top
from the mist--in the early morning--touched with rose, the color of
hope.

THE Four River Country was a place of legend, like most mountain
countries. It was next door to Tibet, white-haired mother of all
mystery, as local poet Chih Nu once said. There was that old legend
that Chi-Tsu--known to the rest of the world as Kubla Khan--would be
coming back. All this like a mountain cloud, misty and mysterious.
And then, there was Chi-Tsu, sure enough--in Kansu, in old
Minchow--knocking wicked war-lords on the head and giving the people
a chance to live again in peace.

There never had been any very strong anti-foreign feeling in the
Sze-Chuen for several reasons. Not very many white foreigners came
this way. Such anti-foreign feeling as there was beat itself out
against the age-old contempt and hatred for the "Mantzu"--those
"Western Barbarians" over in Tibet. The feeling had sufficient
grounds, at that. Most of the Tibetan border tribes were robbers.

But, somehow, the old Society of the Patriotic Harmony Fist--the I
Ho Huan, otherwise, the Boxers--had been gaining strength here in
Shanking lately. When it was learned that Shadak Khan, down in Kansu,
was pushing the organization, the Shanking Boxers not only doubled
their strength overnight; the I Ho Huan began to mean something else.
The "Fist" was meant to smash not only foreign enemies but Chinese
enemies as well...

It was a little old waiter of the Stone Jewel Castle who came
running to the headquarters of the Shanking Boxers along toward
midnight with word that the Black Abbot had taken Shadak Khan captive
and was about to cut off his nose and gouge out his eyes. He told a
circumstantial story.

First of all, early this night, Shadak Khan had appeared at the
Stone Jewel Castle. It was Shadak Khan, as proven by three facts: The
man was white, yet spoke the language like a native son; he'd ordered
tea and refused the society of ladies; he'd given him--himself, Wing
Te--one dollar, and here it was.

Those brethren, moreover, who'd been with the "White Boxer" at the
time of the riot had been circulating through the town accumulating a
following as they went. They were already a good-sized mob by the
time they came to the Boxer headquarters. They got there just in time
to hear the story that Wing Te had to tell.

SHANKING was a labyrinth of hutungs--twisting narrow lanes--and
these began to flood out a human torrent, like so many feeders of the
Yangste in a season of freshets. Men, and most of them armed. If they
hadn't fought in the army of one Lieu, then it had been in the army
of another---deserting at last, stealing their arms. Even if you
couldn't sell a rifle as a rifle, you could always sell it for iron.
Practically all of the rickshaws in Shanking now had rifle-barrels
for axles.

Just this side of the Stone Jewel Palace, the mob met a company of
the Black Abbot's men. The mob rolled over them.

As if oiled and accelerated by this first contact with forthright
battle, the mob rolled on for another mile--meeting more
Tibetans--killing them--all they could catch.

IT was by a roundabout way that the leaders of the mob came back
to the Stone Jewel Castle. They came up to it by a hutung at the
rear. But by this time the place was surrounded.

Thousands were packed into the Road to Heaven Street.

They'd been shouting their "I Ho Huan" and gradually adding to
this that other word that was like a mantram: "Shadak! Shadak!"

A full-throated cry, barking and exploding like light artillery.
When one of those moments of mob-prescience seemed to sweep the
street and there was almost full silence.

And then, there along a balcony, they saw the blare and bob of a
dozen big lanterns--the sort that were used in the Stone Jewel Palace
gambling rooms, and this was just above those rooms. The lanterns
pulled away and left a space into which one man staggered carrying
another. The silence of the mob suddenly broke into a roar.

That was Shadak Khan up there--half-naked, torn and bloody;
looking though somehow even to Chinese eyes, the Fighting Fool. And
the thing he carried--that also they recognized, with that curious,
thousand-eyed and thousand-brained prescience of the mob; it was the
body of the Black Abbot.

Comparative silence fell again, then they heard the white man
shout: "Hey, you, Brethren of the Fist! Want another war-lord?"

And he flung the body of the Black Abbot over to them, down there
into the street.

Shattuck slept late.

He had the better of ten thousand guardians to see that he wasn't
disturbed. The rest of his potential guardians were out hunting--not
only Tibetans, either, this time, but Lieus, the former dukes and
war-lords. Both Lieus and Tibetans were on the run--the former to the
east and the latter to the west--but both of them leaving rich loot
back of them.

SHATTUCK slept, but every so often he'd rouse himself and swab
some wound or other with stuff that had been given him by old Doctor
Wu. He was covered with wounds. The Black Abott had almost got
him--fighting as he was with only his teeth and one arm. But at last
the knife had dropped and it was he who'd got it.

Almost the worst of it was lying there afterward with the dead
Abbott in his arms, waiting to get back enough strength to free
himself. It had been like that when the Brethren of the Fist broke in
and organized their lantern parade.

Doctor Wu came in, a fine old Chinese gentleman with no more idea
of germs than a little child, yet a pretty good doctor, at that.

"Chu dien, dahren!"

It was as if he'd said, "Greetings, Oh, distinguished patient!"
And he'd added an inquiry as to how his distinguished patient
felt.

"Fine!" Shattuck answered in the vernacular; and he thanked and
complimented the fine old man. "Only," said Shattuck, "I'm feeling
pretty hungry."

"Excellent," said Doctor Wu. "And I have brought you something
that is not only food but a marvelous specific--for liver, lungs and
heart. I refer to the celebrated yang yu, or foreign root. He opened
up a silk handkerchief and produced a potato. One slice," he said,
"every half-hour."